Newsletter No. 1: Build a better web site
Hundreds of millions of people access the World Wide Web every day, including more than a few in your town, but you still need to publicize your web site and make it “sticky,” i.e., make visitors want to stay. That is if you want your local audience to stop by on a regular basis.
You probably have subscribers to your paper who may not be regular visitors to your web site because they identify your news product as only the paper. You need to get them – and your non-subscribers – to think of your web site as a “must-visit” site at least several times a week. What are some ways to do this?
Following real estate guidelines, the first three rules of a good web site are content, content, content. You have to offer your visitors content that they want and need. If you don’t know, ask. Focus groups and surveys are relatively simple and cheap to put together.
Build a modern-looking and attractive site. This is easier than ever with numerous companies offering templates at reasonable prices. One example is http://www.joomlart.com, which uses the Open Source content management system Joomla (http://www.joomla.com). Clear instructions help with set-up, and it is reasonably simple to add your content each issue. Your content, a professional look. Perfect.
If it seems a little daunting, grab a local college or high school student to do it for you.
An interesting site for both free and paid web tools to make your site more interactive and fun is at http://www.poppydog.com. Some examples are a forum tool and a visitor tracker tool. You can also set up your site as a membership site, so you can restrict some content to only subscribers if you want. Poppydog has many other tools as well and is worth a serious look. For more free user fun, check out the widgets at http://www.userkit.com.
Next, your content should include blogs from your reporters, and I suggest you get a few from members of the community. In fact, while we are at it, interactivity with your readers is critical. Letters to the editor are not enough. Get your readers involved in the site with their writing and their photographs (another free tool at Poppydog). You get more content – for free – and you gain reader interest.
Other ways to gain traffic are to offer further ways for readers to interact by using polls and surveys; run contests that require site visitors to give you their e-mail address and thereby opt-in for marketing and other messages from you; and be sure to list your web address everywhere: on every page of the website, on rate cards, business cards and everything else you print (including frequently in the paper itself), and in the signature of all staff e-mails.
I hate to say it, but: if you build it – and publicize it – they will come. Often.
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Bob Bohle : : bob@newsdesignschool.com